Archive for Child Abuse

On one of my regular walks with Sammy the poodle along the Kingston lakefront, I came across the plaque pictured above. It stopped me in my tracks. A flood of sadness, then excitement rushed through me. Sadness from being reminded of our nation’s denial of the crimes perpetrated on our young who cannot defend themselves. Excitement because here, marking a recently planted young tree, was a plaque reminding us not of a loved one’s death, but of our children who carry shame and grief in their hearts because of child sexual, emotional and physical abuse. Child abuse is our nation’s best-kept secret. My profound thanks go to whoever chose this way of reminding us of the fate of our children.

Every time someone finds a new way of breaking into our society’s denial of child abuse, I cheer. How else can we protect our children? If our collective head is in the sand, their cries go unheard. We have to educate ourselves about child abuse if we’re going to help. Remember, as Judith Herman tells us: we are either on the side of the victim or the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that you mind your own business, turn the other way. The victim, on the other hand, needs your active involvement. You need to get involved in something that’s not very pretty.

Another recent breakthrough was Linda Stewardson’s recent publication of TheGirl Who Wouldn’t Die. Linda’s book launch and support from her Thunder Bay community is outstanding. Her church provided a venue for further discussion.

Imagine how many citizens in that community and in the communities where Linda speaks about her experiences are now educated about child abuse. What a huge difference that must make in that community. Nobody there can claim to be unaware of the intolerable suffering of some children. Her story will change that whole community.

The Girl Who Wouldn’t Dieis Linda Stewardson’s story of the unimaginable horror she suffered as a child. Her mother chose alcoholic men, the worst of whom stabbed Linda in the chest multiple times and left her for dead in a garbage bag on a remote beach. Fortunately she was found and taken to hospital. Strangely, once in the hospital, nobody questioned how she’d ended up with six knife wounds in her chest, inside a green plastic garbage bag. Instead the adults around, including the doctor and the nurses, asked her asked her why she’d tried to kill herself! Indeed, until she met Dr. Harvey Armstrong, none of the professionals she worked with asked her about child sexual abuse.

As a teenager, Linda lived on the streets, rather than face physical, emotional and sexual abuse at home. This is when she met my husband, Dr. Harvey Armstrong, psychiatrist at Youthdale Treatment Centre in Toronto. Harvey recognized the goodness and the strength in this young person. If only she had stability and safety in her life, he thought, she’d have a chance at living a decent life. This was the start of taking Linda into our own home and fostering her for periods of time.

Not only did Linda recover from trauma and addiction, she went on to marry a good man and, with her husband, adopted two little boys. In her own community, she reaches out to troubled youth assuring them that they, too, can seek help and recover. And now, with the success of her book, Linda is educating a wider circle about the prevalence of child sexual abuse, our society’s best-kept secret.

This is a heart-rending story. The book will enthrall you with Linda’s hopeless attempts to save herself in those years when adults were not to be trusted: and your heart will fill with relief and joy as she finally learns to trust and change the course of her life – from dark and scary to light and love.

“Why didn’t you tell somebody?” That’s the response victims of child sexual abuse often hear when they disclose their traumatic lives as children.

I’d like to offer some reasons children don’t tell:

1) Some children’s brains protect them from what’s inescapable and intolerable by forgetting (dissociating.) Since they don’t remember what happened last time they’re lured by candy or the promise of a cute puppy, again and again. Only later, when it’s safe to remember, do they piece together the underlying causes of their difficulties in life. Some people never remember. Instead their lives are shaped by emotions and fears they don’t understand. Personally, I remembered when I was in my late 40’s, a common age for surfacing lost memories.

“When it came my turn for the honour of riding on Bert’s shoulders, I was confused and uncomfortable to realize his hand was inside my underpants rubbing my genitals….It was months later that I decided to tell my mother the truth about Bert. His assault still bothered me and I hoped that, in telling her, I would feel better. No sooner had I got the words out of my mouth that she turned on me.”

“You nasty little girl,” she almost screamed. “You must have liked it.”

“No,” I protested, “I didn’t like it.”

It was no use. I’d told her and now she looked on me as a bad girl (p. 172)

In all likelihood, I tried to tell her about something much worse – my father and grandfather. It makes sense that her response would have convinced me my intolerable situation was also inescapable. The only way to survive was to “forget.”

3) Nancy Brown, author of Facing Life, had decent, loving parents. Her strange behavior (stealing candy and later drunkenly acting out with people her policeman father knew as criminal types) reflected her shamed view of herself. This child who was being used sexually by the man across the street, blamed herself. There was something awful about her that bad men recognized. She couldn’t bear to tell her parents what she suffered regularly in the house across the street. Her perpetrator threatened to skin her dog and harm her little brother if she told.

“I was tired of hurting down there all the time. I wanted to run away but I couldn’t leave Peter and Rusty with no one to protect them. And Mom and Dad would miss me, even though I worried them.”

Children often keep the perpetrator’s secret out of fear.

4) There’s another reason children keep their perpetrator’s secret. These are children who believe they are involved in a love affair. In my years as a trauma therapist, I often worked with adolescents who thought they were special to the teacher who was abusing them. It was only when it came to light that their lover had a ring of young sexual partners that these young people felt betrayed and disclosed the abuse.

Are there more reasons children keep their terrible secrets? Please leave your comments if you can add to this discussion.

This is the second in a series about the connection between child sexual abuse and alcohol. Recently, I’ve been surprised to realize how even young children learn that alcohol is effective in relieving their shame, their fear and their anger over what abusing adults are doing to them. It works – at least in the short term.

In Drinking: the Intimate Relationship Between Women and Alcohol, Ann Dowsett Johnston interviews Laura who, as a grade twelve student, is already a recovering alcoholic. Laura started drinking at age nine. She’s quoted as saying, “I felt like I could lift buildings…..I thought; I’ll never love anything the way I love alcohol.” (p. 74.)

The love affair lasted several years. Sexually abused as a child, ‘debilitatingly anxious and bulimic,’ ‘Laura shuffled homes, from her mother’s to her father’s to various aunts and uncles.’ Alcohol was a daily constant, often pilfered from relatives’ liquor cabinets. (p. 75.)

I learned a lot more about children and alcohol dependence by reading Nancy Brown’s memoir of addiction, Facing Life. The author tells her story of years of sexual enslavement by the father of a family that moved in across the street from her own caring home. Before long, little Nancy was terrified into serving as a sexual prize for the horrible father’s card playing buddies. She felt trapped and helpless to escape her situation. The only thing that made it bearable was alcohol.

Before she discovered alcohol, she stuffed candy into her mouth, ‘chewing frantically, juice running down my chin.” (p. 16.)

“Soon I started stealing candy from the little corner stores in my neighbourhood…. I’d stuff my pockets and run home to hide it in the back of the closet. … There in the almost dark I made a connection that would last a lifetime. As the sweetness slid down my throat and sleep tugged at my eyelids, I found that I wasn’t afraid any more.” (p. 16 & 17.)

I was startled to relate to this personally. When I was a fat little girl being used sexually by my father and his father, I stuffed my face with spoonfuls of butter and brown sugar. I learned that this dulled the pain. I don’t remember discovering alcohol although, in my adult life, I’ve always been aware of the seductive power of wine and spirits. It would be so easy to become addicted.

Brown’s description of her first experience with alcohol’s effectiveness is a moving tribute to the power of alcohol as a mood altering substance. She was at a school dance when a male friend offered her his flask of spirits:

“When I swallowed, the liquid burned its way down like a hot, lazy snake, and soon the most wonderful thing happened. It felt as though my fairy godmother had finally noticed my needing her and, in one swift act of pity and kindness, flicked her wand. I forgot that I was the fattest girl in the room. I forgot about the despicable things I’d done in the house across the street. And I forgot the bad-man smell that followed me everywhere. My world hardly pinched at all.” (p.25.)

Nancy Brown was one of those children who never dissociated her trauma. She remembered it all, unlike the daughter of the new neighbours, who was Nancy’s age.

In my next blog post I’ll discuss the experience of children who don’t remember their abuse as well as children whose brains somehow didn’t block them from remembering what was intolerable and inescapable.

I’ve been re-reading Ann Dowsett Johnston’s book Drink: The IntimateRelationshipBetween Women and Alcohol.

I guess it shouldn’t surprise me, but the correlation between childhood trauma and adult alcoholism is staggering. Here’s what Ann says:

“The strongest single predictor for both alcoholism and depression is having been sexually abused or traumatized in childhood. …Sexual trauma is the strongest predictor.” (page 81)

The women Johnston interviewed had this to say:

“I drink to numb, I drink to forget, I drink not to feel, I drink not tobe me.” (page 107)

Anyone who has ever felt the soft hum of alcohol going down her throat, blurring pain and depression, knows that alcohol works. You feel more relaxed as the alcohol triggers the reward spot in your brain. All’s well with the world, you’re wittier and wiser than you were before the drink. It’s quick and effective. It’s your best friend. … Until you want it to let go … And it won’t.

The trouble with wine, spirits and beer is this: by the time you realize you’re dependent on them, that your sleep is shallow and your body is suffering, it demands that you drink more and more before it will bless you with its nice warm feelings.

There’s another association with alcohol abuse and childhood trauma. In my personal experience and in all the people I’ve met who suffered abuse at the hands of an adult they trusted, that perpetrator was almost always fueled by alcohol.

In the next post in this series, I’ll look at how traumatized children tend to start drinking early and I’ll introduce another author you may find useful.